A major Dürer exhibition is coming to London this year
The rescheduled National Gallery show will now open in November
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Art lovers should be marking their diaries for one of the year’s biggest blockbusters. In the autumn, the National Gallery will open a massive show devoted to Albrecht Dürer - the first major exhibition on the German Renaissance artist in London for 20 years. Even more excitingly, most of the exhibited works are displayed in Britain for the very first time.
Originally scheduled to open in March but rescheduled for November due to the third English coronavirus lockdown, the exhibition is also the first to focus on the artist through his travels. For those of us who have missed traveling this past year, this show could be the wanderlust fix we need if travel is still restricted. The Gallery promises us it will bring the visitor closer to the people and places Dürer visited through over a hundred paintings, drawings, prints and documents loaned from museums and private collections worldwide.
Christ among the Doctors, Albrecht Dürer, 1506. © Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
The Credit Suisse Exhibition: Dürer’s Journeys – Travels of a Renaissance Artist will chronicle the Nuremberg-born artist’s journeys to the Alps and Italy in the mid-1490s; to Venice in 1505–7; and to the Low Countries in 1520–1, journeys which brought him into contact with artists and fuelled his curiosity and creativity as well as increasing his fame and influence.
Major loans include the artist’s Christ among the Doctors, 1506, (Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid), Saint Jerome, 1521, (Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon), Portrait of a Man, 1521 (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid) and most excitingly, a double-sided painting of a Madonna and Child from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, which has never been seen in the UK ever before.
Madonna and Child Albrecht Dürer about 1496–9. © Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
The show is a collaboration the Suermondt-Ludwig Museum, Aachen, and the list of other museums and galleries lending work is LOOOONG. This really is going to bring together exceptional works from around the world in a way that I suspect will not happen again for a very long time.
The exhibition’s curator, Dr Susan Foister, has said that ‘Dürer’s art knew no boundaries” and that “Through his journeys he came into contact with artists, people and places in ways that fuelled his curiosity and creativity.”
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